Blazing Shield

Jabbs_Giggity · December 2022

Sun Shield is an absolute waste of a Class Skill. Ever since Blinding Light was changed, skill has become nearly useless.

Proposing a change, hear me out...

Current Skill and Morphs:

Sun Shield > Sun Authority

Current: Surround yourself with solar rays, granting a damage shield that absorbs up to 4800 damage for 6 seconds. This portion of the ability scales off your Max Health. Nearby enemies take 1742 Magic Damage when the shield is activated, and each enemy hit increases the shield's strength by 4%.
Change: Surround yourself with solar rays, pull enemies in area to yourself and Immobilize for 1s.

Radiant Ward > Sun Jurisdiction

Current: Surround yourself with solar rays, granting a damage shield that absorbs up to 4800 damage for 6 seconds. This portion of the ability scales off your Max Health. Nearby enemies take 1742 Magic Damage when the shield is activated, and each enemy hit increases the shield's strength by 20%.
Change: Surround yourself with solar rays, pull enemies in area to yourself and Immobilize for 1s and apply Minor Cowardice, reducing their Weapon and Spell Damage by 215.

Blazing Shield > Blazing Dominance

Current: Surround yourself with solar rays, granting a damage shield that absorbs up to 4800 damage for 6 seconds. This portion of the ability scales off your Max Health. Each nearby enemy increases the shield's strength by 4% when the shield is activated. When the shield expires it explodes outward, dealing 30% of the damage it absorbed to nearby enemies.
Change: Surround yourself with solar rays, pull enemies in area to yourself and deal 1742 Magic damage to nearby enemies, each nearby enemy increases the damage by 10%. Ability scales with highest offensive stat.

These changes would give tanking utility to Templars, while also giving a more robust AOE skill. For basic calculations on Blazing Shield on a NON-health build >

Blazing shield can do maximum of 22% of damage absorbed, where damage absorbed can increase 4% per enemy near it.
Even at 10 enemies, thats only a 40% increase. 4800*1.04 at ten times =7389
Damage output at 22% is 6720*.22=1626 damage raw - this doesn't even included PVP scaling, armor, crits, resists, debuffs etc.

New changes would give a base tool-tip with the same up to 10 enemies at 10% damage modifier, 20% and comparison to Magicka Detonation:
10% > 20% > Magicka Detonation
Base > 1742 > 1742 > 449
1 Enemy > 1916 > 2090 > 898
2 Enemy > 2108 > 2508 > 1796
3 Enemy > 2319 > 3010 > 3592
4 Enemy > 2550 > 3612 > 7184
5 Enemy > 2806 > 4335 > 14368
6 Enemy > 3086 > 5202 > 28736
7 Enemy > 3395 > 6242 > 57472
8 Enemy > 3734 > 7490 > 114944
9 Enemy > 4108 > 8988 > 229888
10 Enemy > 4518 > 10786 > 459776

*Edited for errors.

[edited for inappropriate content]

gariondavey · December 2022

As a templar pvp main, this would be absurd.
I'd just gap close with rush of agony, pulling everyone to me. Then I'd immediately cast your new aoe pull + immobilize, pulling everyone in again.
I mean it would be fun af...But this is not balanced.

Thecompton73 · December 2022

No thanks, AOE and/or passive pulls are absolute garbage and should be taken out of PvP. It's by far the most disruptive CC mechanic as you can't break free while being pulled yet continue to take damage and it diminishes positioning as a skill. You wanna single target pull me with chains or silver leash, that's ok, you have to be within gapclose range and actively target me so it's balanced. Being pulled through walls and for over 50m because a dot ticked on a Necro or yanked backwards 10m into a VD/PB explosion because someone 30m away tossed out a volcanic rune just destroys skill based game play and is not fun. Your ideas would compound the issue and just further amplify the ability of ball groups to run around pulling everyone into their path where the victims die before they have any chance to react. All it takes in one second of being helpless and 12 people doing an average of 4Kdps each to kill 99% of the builds in Cyro.

Jabbs_Giggity · December 2022

Pretty sure both your posts completely disregard CC immunity on the pull.

Also, the skills radius is 5m and centered on caster, not a targeted area...not sure where you're getting 30m from.

Also. This would heavily solve PVE tanking with Templars.

As a Templar main, I'm pretty sure you missed the point of this skill not being a button press and passively gaining its function for X amount of time. It's an active ability, you cannot activate it and gap close to "pull everyone to you" until your gap close is finished.

the1andonlyskwex · December 2022

I dunno. I think the problem isn't really a lack of utility, it's just that shields are bad. Also, having Radiant Ward's shield scale off max health while the damage still scales off of damage stats makes it impossible to optimize.

There's certainly no need to add a pull (and a pull with only 5m range wouldn't help tanks much anyway). If I were ZOS, I would start by fixing shields in general, and then reassess afterward.

the1andonlyskwex · December 2022

Also, adding an AoE pull to Sun Shield would basically make it a dramatically better version of Nightblade's Mass Hysteria (which is a 6m AoE fear with major cowardice and no damage).

YandereGirlfriend · December 2022

Jabbs_Giggity wrote: »

Pretty sure both your posts completely disregard CC immunity on the pull.

Also, the skills radius is 5m and centered on caster, not a targeted area...not sure where you're getting 30m from.

Also. This would heavily solve PVE tanking with Templars.

As a Templar main, I'm pretty sure you missed the point of this skill not being a button press and passively gaining its function for X amount of time. It's an active ability, you cannot activate it and gap close to "pull everyone to you" until your gap close is finished.

The Blazing Shield morph is currently 8 meters, so unless you were planning on reducing that back to 5-meters it would present a huge problem.

The way that it would work with Rush of Agony would be that RoA does not apply CC immunity so you could easily gap-close and pull and then pull again with the Templar ability and Immobilize.

In any case though, an AoE pull isn't the solution to Sun Shield being bad. If you want one then use Void Bash from Vateshran. Sun Shield needs a buff, absolutely, but not in this way.

Turtle_Bot · December 2022

Please no, the game has enough issues as it is with pull sets and knock back/up abilities that create all sorts of desync and positional bugs and issues especially during lag/poor performance. The last thing we need is a class having access to a spammable AoE skill that does this en-masse as well. Especially since that same class has an in-class gap closer that stuns allowing for abuse with Rush of agony. Imagine getting Rush + dark convergence combod every 6 seconds (or more frequently during lag where CC immunity doesn't work) because instead of being tied to a 25 second cooldown with a highly visual proc, the second pull is now tied to a spammable utility ability that has no warning and also does damage and provides defense as well.

That sounds absolutely horrendous for pvp, dark convergence had a 10 second cooldown at its lowest and that was bad enough, this just sounds like it would be ripe for abuse, especially by ball groups, nothing could hope to stand against them if this were to be implemented, even as a nerfed version. The pull effect is that broken.

As others have stated, the way to help this ability and morphs is to buff shields in general and allow them to become actually functional as a defensive option again, don't try to give it a bunch of broken or problematic mechanics.

The_Titan_Tim · December 2022

Personally… I would be happy with Blazing Shield’s ward scaling with either your maximum magicka or stamina stat, whichever is higher.

This would remedy the usage problem of the ability, as it’s supposed to protect you while bouncing back damage, the damage scales with the ward size, and the ward scales with your health, resulting in little to no sense given the direction the team have been moving.

Coming from a Templar main, someone who has theory crafted almost a hundred different Templar builds, Blazing Shield only worked well on one build, a Master’s 2h, cleave bomber. The ability underperforms in every other scenario.

notyuu · December 2022

What about making sun sheild truly unique?

When you activate the skill you gain a buff for XX seconds, while this buff is active any healing you recieve will grant you a ward equivlant to XX% of said healing capping out at XX% of your maxium HP.
The ward can be broken and reapplied an unlimited number of times while the buff is active
Only one instance of the ward can be active at a time, recasting the ability removes the current ward

Radiant morph: while the buff is active you can also sheild upto 1 addational ally, the sheild is capped at XX% of their maxium HP

Blazing sheild: when the ward is broken it explodes for XX% of it's total lifetime value

ta-da, sunsheild is now unique and functional